


Thus, Death Did I Become

by paintedpolarbear



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Ending, Control Ending, Fridge Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 14:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8987176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: The terminal at the end of the path glows summer-sky-blue before her, its twin electric columns pulsating with a gentle, inviting light. She is tired, so tired, and the stars are calling. She pushes her hands through the fields of light.





	

**Author's Note:**

> What Bioware could have wrought had they the courage.

The vision begs her:

_Choose._

She couldn’t. How could she?

_Choose._

How could she not, with the stakes a thousand billion lives, the price of failure a death more total than a mortal mind could comprehend, the chance of success a speck of stardust clenched between her teeth?

Somewhere in the back of her mind she’s been keeping a running tally of her injuries, and weighing the sum against the mountainous task still undone. The hardest part still lies in front of her, hovering, the culmination of a thousand darknesses, at the end of the paths she is being asked to take, and all she carries is a scant measure of groaning determination and an M-77 Paladin with one half-empty clip left in it.

_Choose._

She stands, chest heaving, feeling the sting of her shattered breastplate digging into what is probably a fractured rib or three, her own hot salt blood running down her lips, the all-over pain and weariness a staticky roar in her tendons. She stands, bathing in the glow of the Crucible like it’s holy water, her breath coming short under the weight of it, it and the weight of a universe on her back.

_Choose._

But how? She looks between the offered paths and doesn’t see much of a difference.

Organic life is worth more than your shoddy choices, she thinks, but she has finally reached the end of her strength, and her hands are shaking too much with fear to close them into fists, and a more gut-wrenching failure than to gamble the assembled fleets of the galaxy at the Reapers unaided, and lose, does not exist.

But her knuckles are bloodied anyway–and the paths still lie before her.

_Choose._

The middle path–synthesis. Merging of organic and robotic, on the microscopic level. The thought burns her mouth like acid, like bile. To irrevocably alter the very meaning of what it meant to be alive–who had the fucking right–? And on the hunch–a whim–that it would be the eventual endpoint of civilization anyway, that it had to happen sooner or later, when organic life was ready–that only if there was only one kind of life in the galaxy would peace ever be on the table–her stomach twists and she thinks she might retch.

To choose the middle path would be to disregard the choices she had made before this. Brokering peace between an organic species and the synthetic race they had created and then sought to destroy–and had been warring with, for three centuries? How could she spit in the face of that?

_Choose._

The dark path–she reaches out to it, almost instinctively. It’s the simplest option, with the fewest strings attached. It’s everything she’s spent every waking moment of five years striving for. It’s what the people down below are counting on. It’s where she had come up here to go, before she knew there was even such a thing as the Catalyst. Her bruised and broken fingers stretch toward the dark path like it’s a long-lost lover–wistfully, almost,

But–the Crucible will not discriminate, it had said. How many innocents would she trade for organic life? How many could she trade? How many like EDI, like Legion, would die? And where would it end?

Would it stop at AI and be done, or would it crash through the galaxy like a Nile of blood, spring-swollen, and obliterate anything that had evolved from Reaper technology? Would starships fall apart, condemned by their FTL drives developed however indirectly from Reaper tech? Would quarian suits fail, dismantled by a force incapable of distinguishing friend from foe, and leave their wearers to die on a broken planet abandoned by the twice-betrayed geth?

Would she herself die, inundated as she was with technological upgrades and augmentations?

Where would it end? And who would forgive her when the dust was settled?

_Choose._

There is only one way forward.

_So choose._

She grits her teeth, pulls at her own muscles with will enough to move mountains, and takes a heaving step down the lit path. She chooses.

Another step.

And another.

She’s limping–there’s something broken in every one of her limbs, and her left ankle is protesting every step–but she is moving forward. She moves achingly slowly, breath stuttering and shallow and gasping, her broken body straining, propelled more by will-power than whatever physical strength is left. The pistol slips from her numb fingers and clatters to the ground.

Heart pounding, blood roaring in her ears, she tries to walk faster. She feels herded, afraid; how could she succeed where so many others had failed?

I don’t want power, like he did, she thinks. I just want this damn war to be over.

And maybe that will be enough.

The terminal at the end of the path glows summer-sky-blue before her, its twin electric columns pulsating with a gentle, inviting light. She is tired, so tired, and the stars are calling. She pushes her hands through the fields of light.

Constellations of pain erupt in her skull, a nebula of blue-white starfire arcing along her nerves. Her muscles sieze, broken hands clamped around the levers that she needs to hold onto no matter what, spine arching like she’s being defibrillated, heart thudding in triple time, chest bursting with the air she is no longer able to gasp.

Slick with blood, one hand slips from the lever, and the other hand threatens to follow. She falls on her knees. The pain lessens, minutely.

She shuts her eyes. Heaves herself back to her feet. Closes her hand around the lever. Feels the blue-white light drown out the red pain of the broken bones in her fingers grinding against each other.

God, the pain.

The blood on her face flakes away, dried–burned. She is shaking, dissolving, she is being ripped apart atom by atom and it hurts–

–and her disintegrating throat closes around her voiceless scream, her every bone is powder, every muscle and every ligament is dust, she is ash scattered to the solar winds and everything is blue, blue, blue–

and gray–

–and black–

  


–and dark–

  


–she never expected the afterlife to be such a lonely shade of black–

  


–and the whispers haven’t stopped. They never did. She uncurls.

  


Voices, familiar and unfamiliar, push through the haze. Memories, visions of species, civilizations, rising and falling…millenia of the galaxy’s history unfurl, scrolling past in all dimensions like the individual frames of a holovid.

She reaches out to touch it, and finds her hands are gone. She tries to open her eyes, and finds she doesn’t have any.

Is this what it’s like to be dead? she thinks. No - for all the common threads woven into the religions of the galaxy’s history, she darkly suspects the true afterlife would not contain… _this_.

Something solidifies around her. Not to contain–for her consciousness, her soul, is dancing through the galaxy like a newborn god–but embracing, offering the use of itself for her purposes. She curls around and slides into it, pries it open from inside, and finds that she can use it as eyes, as hands, as voice. She looks, and the view is multifaceted, kaleidoscoped; the galaxy entire, viewed through a compound lens.

She stretches across the incorporeal synapses and axions that spiderweb across the stars. She can feel the thoughts and memories echoing at every junction–every being connected to her and to each other across light years, to the edge of the dark space, hears the faint hum of ancient, ethereal thoughts turning their attention toward her–

–she stops.

Something is wrong.

The thoughts of the beings she had once called Reapers resonate across the synapses. They echo, rumbling, murmuring…drowning out the tuneless noise, the countersong, the voice without harmony.

And her thoughts–her song does not obey the harmony of the Reaper collective.

She no longer has or needs lungs, but she feels as though she is choking.

The Reaper song crashes into her, sour and yellow and buzzing through her mind like the throbbing hum of the morning after too many drinks. Their minds are mountains, iron walls, ancient war machines crawling with the patience of infinity. Their single unison note hammers relentlessly at her consciousness, chipping away at her will…and she has a feeling not unlike that of someone with their head held underwater, screaming and thrashing in vain.

She has no lungs. She can’t scream.

She tries so damn hard to _think_ –

  


–and as she drowns, her thoughts–their thoughts– _our_ thoughts–ring like crystal.

  


In another cycle, she announces the new harvest: Foolish, primitive creatures. Our existence cannot be grasped. Your attempts to try are feeble, weak. Useless.

We are the horde. Incalculable. At the time of our arrival our numbers will darken every sky and lay every world to waste. You will fight. You will resist. And you will die.

Your cycle is no different than any before.

I am the solution.

I am Inexorable.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a fanmix to go with this! http://8tracks.com/klinneah/who-is-in-control
> 
> This was originally posted to tumblr on December 4, 2014.


End file.
